The Boundaries of Jewishness in the Southern Levant 200 BCE–132 CE

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The Boundaries of Jewishness in the Southern Levant 200 BCE–132 CE is written by John Van Maaren and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 3110787482 (ISBN 10) and 9783110787481 (ISBN 13).

Recent research has considered how changing imperial contexts influence conceptions of Jewishness among ruling elites (esp. Eckhardt, Ethnos und Herrschaft, 2013). This study integrates other, often marginal, conceptions with elite perspectives. It uses the ethnic boundary making model, an empirically based sociological model, to link macro-level characteristics of the social field with individual agency in ethnic construction. It uses a wide range of written sources as evidence for constructions of Jewishness and relates these to a local-specific understanding of demographic and institutional characteristics, informed by material culture. The result is a diachronic study of how institutional changes under Seleucid, Hasmonean, and Early Roman rule influenced the ways that members of the ruling elite, retainer class, and marginalized groups presented their preferred visions of Jewishness. These sometimes-competing visions advance different strategies to maintain, rework, or blur the boundaries between Jews and others. The study provides the next step toward a thick description of Jewishness in antiquity by introducing needed systematization for relating written sources from different social strata with their contexts.